The festival industry is booming and is providing a fertile ground for vendors to showcase and offer sampling opportunities to their customer base. Such temporary events are proving to be attractive marketing campaigns for the vendors looking to increase their customer base and introduce new consumers to their products by offering an opportunity to sample various items.
A festival is an event ordinarily staged by a community, centering on and celebrating some unique aspect of that community and its traditions, often marked as a local or national holiday. Festivals often serve to meet specific purposes, especially in regard to commemoration and/or celebration. A festival provides an opportunity for people to come together and celebrate while also partaking in entertainment.
A food festival is an event celebrating food or drink. A food festival usually highlights the output of producers from a certain region. Some food festivals are focused on a particular type of food item. There are also specific beverage festivals, such as the famous Oktoberfest in Germany for beer. Many cities hold festivals to celebrate wine or other produce from local producers.
A fair is a gathering of people to display or trade produce or other goods, to parade or display animals and often to enjoy associated entertainment like a circus or joy rides. Festivals and fairs are normally temporary in nature; some last only an afternoon while others may last a few days.
Since the nature of festivals and fairs is temporary and the vendors participating in these events are generally small local vendors who have limited to no technology at their disposal; consumer information gathering at such events is not possible.
Festivals and fairs require small cash transactions. This is particularly true of festivals and fairs centred around food or drinks, where users are encouraged to sample a wide variety of items from different vendors. Thus consumers are required to keep a lot of cash or coins on hand to make these small transactions which can be very inconvenient. Similarly for the vendors, it takes a lot of time to complete a sale when dealing with small cash/coin based transactions, since they must count the cash amount handed by the consumer and provide the exact change back to the consumer. The vendors must also ensure that they don't run out of change. When closing the day for sales, all cash must be counted, added and taken safely to be deposited at a bank or other financial institution.
To compound this problem, consumers have steadily been moving away from cash based transactions as they don't want to have the hassle of carrying cash and coins which can also be easily lost in the rush of a festival. Touchless and cashless transaction methods have emerged that provide convenience and save time. Such touchless and cashless transactions may for example use credit cards or other devices embedded with RFID (Radio-frequency identification) tags. RFID tags allow for a “tap and go” style of payment because the information is transmitted wirelessly. Two-way radio transmitter-receivers called “readers” send a signal to the tag and read its response. In such a transaction the user is not required to sign a piece of paper or to enter the PIN number, and neither there is any verification of signature.
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is the wireless non-contact use of radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to transfer data, for the purposes of automatically identifying and tracking tags attached to objects. The tags contain electronically stored information. Some RFID tags are powered by and read at short ranges (a few centimeters) via electromagnetic induction. Other types of RFID tags may use a local power source such as a battery, or else have no battery but collect energy from the interrogating electromagnetic field, and then act as a passive transponder to emit microwaves or UHF (ultra high frequency) radio waves. Unlike a bar code, the RFID tag does not necessarily need to be within line of sight of the reader, and may be embedded in an object.
RFID tags can be passive or active or battery-assisted passive. A passive tag is cheaper and smaller because it has no battery. An active tag has an on-board battery and periodically transmits its ID signal. A battery-assisted passive (BAP) tag has a small battery on board and is activated when in the presence of an RFID reader.
Tags may either be read-only, having a factory-assigned serial number that is used as a key into a database, or may be read/write, where object-specific data can be written into the tag by the system. Field programmable tags may be write-once, read-multiple; “blank” tags may be written with an electronic product code by the user.
Generally fixed RFID readers are set up to create a specific interrogation zone which can be tightly controlled. This allows a highly defined reading area for when tags go in and out of the interrogation zone. Mobile RFID readers may be hand-held or mounted on carts or vehicles.
Despite advances in the technology, prior methods have various shortcomings, including a lack of information gathering about consumer sampling at a festival or fair. Since the duration of a festival or fair is so brief, conventional methods for setting up and collecting consumer behaviour information are not suitable or may cost too much to provide a meaningful business benefit. Thus consumer information is neither collected nor compiled in real time to be useful due to the brevity of the event. Thus a wholesale change is needed in the way brands and/or vendors and/or manufacturers (distributors, event organizers, exhibitors, etc.) engage with their audience from basic entry all the way to post event communication and data mining.
Prior methods used at fairs and festivals to link consumers to vendors use analog and manual ways such as the distribution of coupons, vouchers, business cards, flyers, etc. at the time of registration. Typically consumers attending such events are given a welcome bag that contains many of the aforementioned and other promotional items. Such methods are outdated as they are bulky, expensive and environmentally unfriendly.
It would be desirable to provide a tracking system for product sampling at events that uses RFID technology within an interrogation zone.